Sarah is a 20 year old student currently studying for her degree in psychology. She is currently in her third year of a four year course. Sarah loves the psychology of people, so why a person will make the choices they do and how they act in different social situations. Sarah is one of the more attentive people in the class because she finds the subject she is learning about very interesting. She is looking forward to completing university and getting a job within the industry however she is a little nervous about the lack of jobs at the moment.

Sarah currently does all of her coursework from within university. This is frustrating for her as it means that she has to go into university almost every day including weekends just to do some work. Sarah’s friends will often work from their home or will go around to each other’s flats and work together; Sarah feels that this would be a great benefit to her as she would get other people’s views on the subject as well as her own.

Goals

• Purchase a laptop that she can take to her friends
• Find out other people’s opinions on the laptops
• Get technical information in a non-technical language

Questions

• How much should I be looking to spend?
• How much support will I get?
• How long will it take the laptop to arrive?

Scenario

Sarah is sat at the computer at university looking for a laptop. She goes onto a website that sells laptops. She knows she doesn’t want to spend more than £400. She clicks through to the laptop section and uses the short form to reduce the results to fit her budget. She then compares the laptop with the compare function that was available through the website. Once she has found a few laptops that she feels will suit her needs and looks nice, she then looks at the user feedback, which she found by clicking through to the page that gives all of the details of the laptop instead of the compare page. She scrolls though the comments and sees what people have said about the product. She notices that one of the laptops she has picked, despite looking nice, apparently will break very easily, so she removes that from her selected list. She makes her decision on which laptop she will buy however before checking out she double checks the price against other websites that sell laptops. She realises that the original website is still the best as essential programmes she needs such as Microsoft Office comes installed with the laptop and is included in the price. She then proceeds to the checkout.